It has been about 10 years since I last visited the AWS Summit in Sydney and the one in 2024 did not hold back! Cheers Amazon!
Amazon.com is roughly evaluated at 1.82 trillion USD today and we go to their summits to get a peek at trending technologies, their applications, and market opportunities. We attended the
Builders Day - Wednesday 10 April 2024 which was at ICC and offered multiple stages for speakers, workshops, certifications, start-ups, and many more including a DJ performance towards the end!
Although we wanted to engage with as many names and products as much as we could, the activity was aimed at the current state of web and marketing in 2024 and the years ahead of it in line with the AWS ecosystem. About a decade ago, the buzz was about “The Cloud, Agility and Big Data” and now the focus is on “AI, Cybersecurity and Sustainability.” Last time most companies that embraced “The Cloud,” (using AWS services for example) improved their efficiency, reduced costs and generally came out more competitive. Today cloud system adoption is a pre-requisite to compete at large. It can be noted that significant
stock rallies in 2023 were attributed to the adoption of AI by listed firms across US and the World.
Regardless of whether the market is expanding or contracting, efficiency is one of the key performance metrics for any firm around the world, whether they want to grow or to survive. AWS again reminded me of the vast arsenal of tools and solutions that they offer to help businesses at any scale. Our small company, BAM Studio, maintains a vision and technology capacity for hopeful 6-8 years ahead. It is important for us to provide competitively priced web solutions at a high level of customisation (web design and tailored marketing) in order to grow. With new web technologies disrupting markets,
reducing cost per click, or simply planning content, organisations must use current tech.
So, what opportunities did AWS present for web developers and marketers this year?
Here are some of the most relevant highlights of the summit on web design and development for the Australian web:
Artificial Intelligence
Without a doubt, web designers and developers have been busy putting AI tools for enhanced perosnalisation, content creation, and learning. AWS showcased some tools that are cost-effective, such as
Amazon Bedrock which offers competitive rates and incredible capabilities to use existing libraries and even upload your own links and information to further improve relevancy for the AI-generated images and critical answers.
Customer Experience
I feel that customer experience is the most important aspect in the retail, industry, and even internal marketing efforts to further drive brand loyalty to new heights. Of course, AI capabilities were featured, including modern applications. The highlight is the real-time AI deployment, I guess it can be called Situational-awereness? - Either way, creating content on the fly based on user input such as a hand gesture or an analytics trigger can gradually improve UX. This leads me to believe that the UI is going to become even more dynamic and tailored.
Cyber security
A big portion of the stands and sponsors were cyber security firms. It makes sense where the demand is consistent with the growth and expansion of microenterprises and the ecosystem as a whole. Constant monitoring and automation require a lot of data and processing. Additional intelligent and automated security layers reduce total costs against nasty attacks and exploits.
From our internal diagnostics at BAM Studio, we see that ALL websites, especially, Wordpress and other major scalalables, recieve a ton of requests to get the right user name and/or passwords on a daily basis. AWS doubles down on monitoring data backed by solutions.
Conclusion
Although we agree with AWS for the most part, I must admit that the "Customer Experience" stage was a bit vague. Yes, it makes sense to track the hell out of the visitor, and react to their needs with adaptive AI for security, content and real-time applications. It is hard to narrow down and scale, AWS helps us create and build, however, we must be reactive and continue to study the local landscape and deliver specific market anchors. Systems at large are unable to identify local, simply because there are not enough listening outposts. We expect AWS to integrate further, considering they have already delivered some of the best tech around.
It is important to understand the needs of the users and provide platforms for their feedback. Whether it is via likes or other forms of binary. I feel that there is a huge potential behind simpler and more convenient user feedback systems on websites other than crap chatbots.